Celebrated Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is one of ten featured artists commissioned to create a new work especially for PERFORMA 07. For his first ever live performance, Vezzoli will present a...

Celebrated Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is one of ten featured artists commissioned to create a new work especially for PERFORMA 07. For his first ever live performance, Vezzoli will present a restaging of Cosi??™ e (se vi pare,) or Right You Are (If You Think You Are), the renowned play by the Italian Nobel Laureate, Luigi Pirandello in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Written and produced in 1917, Pirandello??™s timeless work examines the fundamental ambiguity of truth, and the seductive powers of language in conjuring up a female character who may never actually appear amongst the actors on stage as they obsessively dissect her attributes and identity. Rumor and celebrity mongering become the substitute for a deeply examined life, and Pirandello, as does Vezzoli in his own art, points to these empty vessels as a means of drawing attention to existential and humanist concerns.

An extraordinary cast of top-billed actors have responded to Vezzoli??™s visionary approach to Pirandello??™s jewel of a work, Right You Are (If You Think You Are) that implicates the audience in its examination of celebrity, and that points also to the relativity of truth, the necessity of illusion, and the instability of the human persona.

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The mission of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is to promote the understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, and other manifestations of visual culture, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, and to collect, conserve, and study the art of our time. The Foundation realizes this mission through exceptional exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications, and strives to engage and educate an increasingly diverse international audience through its unique network of museums and cultural partnerships.